Like most members of our species, I have—shall we say—"a thing" for chocolate, and Hershey's make some very delectable chocolate treats. I happily carted home several kilos of the stuff from the Hershey Chocolate Shoppe that is attached to the factory. The Visitor's Center also features a "free self-guided tour from an elevated viewing gallery" to see the treats in production, which is pretty cool.

What isn't so cool is that a total of about 500 people will lose their jobs with the closure of the factory. As I understand it, 100 positions have already been eliminated and eventually about 400 more people will lose their jobs.

Incidentally, the population of Smiths Falls is roughly 10,000. The closure is expected to be devasting to the town. The outragehasonlyjustbegun.

Monday, March 05, 2007

By the way, when I googled "thought du jour" just now, I got "about 23,100" results. Double by-the-way, does anyone have a roughly precise (if you know what I mean) notion of what Google means by "about x results"? Triple by-the-way, it almost goes without saying: props to Google!